Lorraine Mooney

Lorraine Mooney works with Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), a pro-DDT advocacy group. A biographical note states that she "has been working with AFM since 2004 as a researcher, editor, economist and medical demographer. She writes research papers and editorials on a variety of public health issues. Previously she ran the European Science and Environment Forum, an educational charity, for 10 years, latterly as director."

Background

In early 2004 a brief biographical note at the foot of a column she wrote for the South African think tank, the Free Market Foundation, stated that she was "a medical demographer and a Research Fellow with International Policy Network (IPN) in the USA." (Mooney was listed as being a member of staff at IPN between September 2004 and approximately June 2004. Mooney was listed as "Health Project Coordinator".

A biographical profile states that she studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the University of London between 1994 and 1996. Her profile states that she is interested in "consulting offers" and "new ventures".

Defending Big Tobacco and Promoting DDT

In a series of articles in 1997 and 1998 Mooney criticized the World Health Organization for its role in developing the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and argued that reducing the incidence of malaria in developing countries was a higher priority. WHO's move to curb tobacco consumption in the developing world, she claimed, was "a change in policy emphasis from disease prevention to lifestyle control." (The WHO estimate that "tobacco-related deaths will increase to more than eight million a year by 2030, and 80% of those deaths will occur in the developing world.") Mooney also complained that if the convention was adopted "much money will be spent on anti-tobacco education" which poor African countries "might have preferred help in combating infectious and water-borne diseases."

She also claimed that deaths and illness caused by Environmental Tobacco Smoke were being exaggerated by tobacco control advocates and that a World Bank report on tobacco -- Curbing the Epidemic -- was based on "data manipulation, obfuscation and tenuous assumptions."

By the end of the decade, Mooney had sharpened her focus to criticise the WHO over the lack of household spraying of DDT in developing countries as a measure against DDT and argued against a ban on the chemical. "The DDT-malaria issue is a stark illustration of the conflict between the developed and developing world. For the sake of a possible environmental threat to birds of prey in the "civilized" world, millions of people in developing countries are dying. This must stop. The U.N. delegates in Geneva should vote against banning DDT," she wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

Mooney was listed as one of the signatories of 'Kill Malarial Mosquitoes NOW!: A Declaration of the Informed and Concerned.

Notable Quotes

• August 25, 1997: "The introduction this week of a proposal for an antitobacco convention at the World Health Organization's 10th "Tobacco or Health" conference is the latest indication that the public-health profession is more concerned with changing lifestyles than doing what it was originally established to do--cure disease ... So funds that should be spent on malaria eradication are likely instead to be spent in Africa and Asia on antitobacco campaigns of dubious significance ... It should be of concern to all of us that a change in policy emphasis from disease prevention to lifestyle control is occurring with almost no debate. The WHO is simply following the lead set by groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, who push birth control on the Third World because of Western preoccupation of an impending population explosion and food shortages. After all, smoking is not a disease but a personal choice. If the tobacco control convention comes into force, how long before one on alcohol, sexual practice or vehicle speeds is proposed, all of which indirectly kill millions of people every year?."

Affiliations

• 1994-1996: studying at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
• 1994-2004: European Science and Environment Forum
• 2004- present: Africa Fighting Malaria

Publications

• Roger Bate and Lorraine Mooney (eds), Environmental Health, Third World Problems, First World Preoccupations, Butterworth Heinemann, March 1999. ISBN 0750642238 ISBN 978-0750642231
• Roger Bate and Lorraine Mooney, "WHO's Comprehensive HIV Treatment Failure: Will We Learn the Real Lessons from 3 by 5?", AEI Working Paper 133, American Enterprise Institute, November 30, 2006.
• Roger Bate, Richard Tren, Lorraine Mooney, and Kathryn Boateng, Tariffs, Corruption and Other Impediments to Medicinal Access in Developing Countries: Field Evidence, Working paper 130, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, 2006.

Articles and Resources

External Articles

Articles by Mooney

• Lorraine Mooney, "The WHO's Misplaced Priorities", Wall Street Journal Europe, August 25, 1997.
• Lorraine Mooney, "Smoking Out Bad Science", Wall Street Journal - European Edition, March 12, 1998.
• Lorraine Mooney, "World Bank and WHO Gang Up On Big Tobacco", Wall Street Journal Europe, May 18, 1999.
• Lorraine Mooney, "A DDT Ban Would Be Deadly", Wall Street Journal, September 2, 1999.
• Lorraine Mooney, "Setting the tobacco record straight?", The Lancet, Volume 356, Issue 9226, Page 336, 22 July 2000.
• Lorraine Mooney, "Remember TB?", Free Market Foundation (South Africa), March 23, 2004.
• Roger Bate and Lorraine Mooney, "Libyan AIDS Trial Exposes Wider Truths", TCS Daily, December 21, 2006.
• Roger Bate and Lorraine Mooney, First, Do No Harm: The Toll of Unhealthy Health Care Practices, Health Policy Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, October 10, 2007.

General Articles

• Joseph R. Zanga, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Victor J. Stevens, assistant director of epidemiology and disease prevention at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, "Cigarettes at Home, A Child in the Hospital", Letters to the Editor, Wall Street Journal (Eastern edition), April 13, 1998. pg. 1.
• Andrew Leonard, "Following the junk science money trail", Salon, June 5, 2008.